Child of Ruin and Hope
by Evandar
Summary: Oneshot. After Sauron's fall, Thranduil leads his people home with a child in his belly. He was expecting a monster - an Orc - but what he got was Legolas. After all, weren't the Orcs once Elves as well? Warnings: MPreg, mentions of rape and infanticide


**Disclaimer:** I do not own any of Tolkien's works or characters and am making no profit from this story.

**AN:** This was written for a prompt on the Hobbit Kink Meme. I'm going to warn again for the mentions of rape and infanticide. Thranduil's inner thoughts aren't overly pleasant, and he's got a lot of recovery to do.

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Child of Ruin and Hope

by Evandar

He hadn't faded. By some cruel twist of fate, the remains of his scattered, defeated people had been enough to inspire him to survive their journey north. He had had to force himself to do it – to fill the role his father had been ripped from – and lead them back to the forest to rest and recover. So many were dead. There would be so many empty talans upon their return, and so many grieving kinsmen abandoning the trees to sail West, but there would be no ship for Thranduil.

By the time they reached the eaves of his kingdom, his belly had started to swell. What the O – what those foul creatures had done to him would have been impossible to forget, but now he carried a living reminder of their evil. When his people became curious, he told them the child's father had been slain in battle. It was all the truth of the matter that he would ever give. (His father had saved him. His father had ripped into those creatures with sword and knives and gathered Thranduil up in his arms as if he wasn't filthy and ruined. His father had been slain in turn two days later.)

He had suffered months of fluttering movements and powerful kicks. While struggling to re-establish his kingdom, he had been plagued by his pregnancy as well. Doubts and fears and terrible nightmares of birthing a monster into the world. The only thing that had saved the child so far was that he had discovered it too late to purge it from his body with herbs and potions without damaging himself, and his people needed him too much for him to abandon them to their fate.

The child would be vulnerable when it was free of him, however, and that would be soon.

He had sent the guards away when his contractions had started. He had already refused healers – they had enough to deal with, making sure that their injured brethren became hale once more – and he had been a healer in his own right once, before he had ever been a prince. He knew how to deliver a child. He also knew how to kill one.

His babe would die from unforeseen complications in the birth – the cord about its neck, perhaps, or a breach-birth. He would give a show of grief and live on, continuing to dedicate himself to his kingdom as his father would have wanted. And if the 'complication' was a thin, needle-sharp blade through the child's ribs or a pillow over its monstrous face, then who but he was to know of it?

It took what felt like hours for the child to slip free of him, and he collapsed, panting, onto the nest of blankets he had made of the birth. He could hear its cries, and feel the umbilical cord that yet bound them together, but he couldn't bring himself to look. Not just yet.

It sounded healthy.

He delivered the afterbirth, and only then, when it was truly gone from his body, did he shift on his bloody, makeshift bed to inspect it.

He flinched away at first. The babe was covered in blood and fluid, but then, Thranduil told himself, it wasn't the only one. He forced himself to look again, and this time he saw delicately pointed ears and a smattering of pale, colourless hair smeared against the crown of its head. He saw even, elvish features, and little hands with tiny nails that were currently balled into fists in protest at its lacklustre welcome to the world.

Thranduil reached out a hand and gently touched one of those fists with trembling fingers. His child was an Elf. It – he, rather – was an Elf, not an Orc. His breath hitched. Slowly, carefully, he scooped his child up into his arms and held him. He was warm against Thranduil's chest and oddly heavy, but he was beginning to calm down now that he was being held.

His eyes, when they opened for the first time, were startlingly blue and free of all traces of evil. Instead they gazed up at Thranduil with badly-focussed innocent wonder, and Thranduil knew then that he would never be able to harm this child. It was his. His child. The first child born in the Greenwood after the fall of the Deceiver…and Thranduil had thought of three hundred ways to kill him, but not of a single name.

It would not be anything ambitious, he thought, inspecting the sweet bow of his babe's upper lip. Nor would it be anything reminiscent of pain or suffering. It would have to be something light and bright and hopeful. Something – given his story of a Silvan father – forest related and far removed from the destructive nature of his true father's people.

He would be kept as far away from that, from the corruption that Thranduil knew still lingered despite the Deceiver's fall, for as long as Thranduil could keep him that way. He would grow up loved and sheltered, a wild woodland Elf. He would never know that darkness of his origins.

"Legolas," Thranduil decided. A good, Silvan name. "You are Legolas Thranduilion." He gave a soft, shuddering sigh and gripped his babe a little tighter. "You are my son, and you will be good."

Thranduil would make sure of it.


End file.
